Zeitgeist

 I'm way behind on podcasts as usual and I'm sure there were tons that I thought over the last two weeks that I should highlight but *gestures vaguely at the clown shoes that is my life right now*

Anyway, for your moment of relative levity, check out If Books Could Kill's Thomas Chatterton Williams' "Summer Of Our Discontent." Unlike most of the episodes I hadn't heard of that book or the author until I started listening and went, oh, that guy. For those of you who share my senility, Williams is one of those Token Black Conservatives(TM) who doesn't believe that leopards will eat his face. His middle name is a bad case of nominative determinism as he mouths far-right talking points in the most number of words possible this side of Nick Land. The book could probably be a pamphlet if he wrote like a normal person, but he doesn't. Anyway, it's garbage anti-BLM stuff now that the right has lost Cosby, but it's made a little more fun by just listening to Michael and Peter try to quote it.

Pro tip: No marginalized group is a monolith, and you can't just single out one member of a community because they happen to agree with your take. There's a fortune to be had if you can be that token member of a community that loudly proclaims that said community doesn't actually face oppression,* and that's what this guy is doing, and it's incredibly mockworthy.


* Still trying to cash in on that myself.

Just finished: Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth by Adam Turl. This was a good, if very dense, look at the intersection between art, the art market, and economic forces, and how we can create an authentically proletarian art. Basically the antidote to AI slop memes. I was just nodding along the whole way through, like, yes, someone said the thing. My one complaint is, as with a lot of small press books, it's not the most physically comfortable to read, with gutter margins that are too narrow, which makes an already challenging read more challenging. So if you're going to read it (and you should) see if there's an ebook.

Currently reading: Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation by Sim Kern. Sim Kern is a very relatable person to me, although I don't know them personally at all. They're Jewish but like, not closely tied to the Jewish community or faith, and they used to be a teacher, and they've been trying to make it as a sci-fi author. And then our stories diverge because it turns out their real gift is talking about Palestine on TikTok, and along with the death threats, they managed to get a serious platform.

The book starts with a lot of their story and philosophy, and then the bulk of it is devoted to unpacking and dismantling the main claims of hasbara (Israeli propaganda, literally "explaining"). It's all written in very approachable language with tons of footnotes. You can tell they used to be a middle school teacher. I don't know that this would convince someone with the Zionist brainworms, but for the average white American who doesn't want to be an antisemite, hears conflicting claims, and hasn't grown up in this confusing ideological soup, it's hella useful. I'd really recommend it as well for people like me who have to get in dumb Facebook fights with people who are genuinely convinced that Hamas is going to come kill them in some random American city.

Just finished: Antifa Lit Journal Vol. 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire's Yacht?, edited by Chrys Gorman. There are some really good stories in here and one good poem, and I'm cautiously optimistic for the future of the journal? I'm thinking a lot lately about didacticism in art and its purposes, and of course about writing dystopian fiction while living in a dystopia. There's the sort of "this thing that is happening is bad and you should be upset about it" kind of classic dystopia, and there's the hopepunk variant of "here are some people fighting against the bad thing?" but I think we ought to be pushing past both of those tendencies. To what end? I don't know. I'm thinking a lot about Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco, which sadly I have never seen staged but is one of the most brilliant explorations of fascism in the way that it weirds it and adds something new and useful to our understanding of fascist psychology, and thus our ability to resist it. (It is unfair, of course, to critique something for not being Ionesco.) So I dunno how to do that, I am a hack and a fraud. Anyway, there were a couple of really standout stories—one about a house contents sale, one with a retelling of Fall of Jericho, one about a group of church ladies resisting ICE, and of course the title story.

Currently reading: Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth by Adam Turl. Adam is a Marxist artist and critic whose work I really enjoy, so when they came out with an actual book that I can recommend to people, I was all fuck yeah. This examines the relationship of art to capitalism and resistance, drawing on Benjamin, Fisher, Brecht, and so on. It gets points right off the bat for explaining uneven and combined development, which the Historical Materialism crowd is always on about, in a way my never-went-to-grad-school brain can actually understand. I just finished the bit on the ways in which conceptual art arose in rejection of the commercial art market and then almost immediately got subsumed into it. Anyway, it's really good.